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She’s a beautiful, talented woman who, given that she’s been dead for the better part of a century, has little to no control over how her image is used. Of course Frida Kahlo has been hijacked by capitalism.

Instagram was recently awash with snaps of women attending a Frida Kahlo themed afternoon tea. You know afternoon tea – the one where they charge you the price of a small car for some dry sandwiches and sweet prosecco.

Now, I’m about as capitalist as they come. There’s nothing wrong with the warm rush of buying things, I mostly work in order to support my ASOS habit. But even I, with my insatiable thirst for stuff, find the co-option of Frida Kahlo’s image hard to stomach.

The Kahlo afternoon tea might well have been a wonderful experience. But realistically, do we think that Frida would have been okay with her name being used to sell people an expensive non-meal?

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That’s the thing about Frida. Somewhere along the line, while they were making her into a Barbie or when she became the ‘I’m not like other girls’ Halloween costume of choice, everyone seemed to forget that Frida wasn’t just the beautiful woman with the monobrow who Selma Hayek played in the movie.

She was a politically motivated artist.

(Picture: Reuters/Hannah McKay)

Last year Theresa May wore a Frida Kahlo bracelet to the Conservative Party conference.

Without meaning to dive into party politics too much, a woman who was so socialist she literally f**ked Trotsky probably wouldn’t have been pleased that Theresa May – not exactly a Red – was wearing her art as an accessory.

Those self-portraits were painted by a woman in terrible pain, a woman who often had to lie flat on her bed for months at a time due gangrene in her foot. They’re not sweet little selfies to be reproduced by anyone who likes a flower crown and has a passing respect for Girl Power.

The V&A currently have an exhibition about Frida and are selling flower crowns by designer Phillipa Craddock in the gift shop for between £160and £245. Which is, however beautiful they are, rather a lot of money.

Beautiful, but very expensive (Picture: Victoria and Albert museum)

Phillipa is an artist, and there’s no reason that she shouldn’t be able to charge money for her work. But isn’t there something a little uncomfortable about charging that money with Frida Kahlo’s name attached, a woman who would think that spending £245 on a flower crown was deeply unimpressive.

Slightly less expensive, but not cheap. (Picture: Victoria and Albert museum)

Of course during her lifetime Frida made money from selling her art.

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She was even commissioned by the Mexican government. But that’s a bit different to slapping her face on a pair of socks so that offices arFiat 500 girls will buy them for each other’s Secret Santa. She needed money to live, and when she was selling her own art she at least had control over what she was creating.

I don’t doubt that the desire to plaster Frida’s face everywhere is born of good intention. I love that we live in a world where a disabled Latina artist can be a globally recognized icon. But so much of the representation of her smacks of sanitisation. From the tidied up monobow that Frida Barbie wore, to the fact that it’s her beautiful self-portraits which are reproduced everywhere rather than the angry, agonized nudes, Frida is being shrunk down to suit mass marketing.

So if you are going to wear a flower crown and a power brow for a party, or attend a Frida Kahlo afternoon tea, please at least have a think about who FK really was and what she would want from you.

Maybe you respect her memory by donating what you can to someone who needs it more than you, or maybe you do it by putting aside time to practice whatever it is that you love doing. But don’t just cherry pick the parts of her that are pretty, adopt her aesthetic and wipe away all the ugly painful parts of her. Because whether the mass market agrees or not, those were the most important and the most exciting parts.

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We have reached out to everyone referenced in this story. We had not received comment from them at time of publication.